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Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Book Information

In "The Syntax of Adjectives", Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguisticevidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standardview, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque proposes thatadjectives enter the nominal phase either as "adverbial" modifiers to thenoun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidencecomes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages.These two language families differ with respect to the canonical positiontaken by adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- andpostnominal in Romance. Cinque shows that a simple N(oun)-raising analysisencounters a number of problems, the primary one of which is its inabilityto express a fundamental generalization governing the interpretation ofpre- and postnominal adjectives in the two language families. Cinque arguesthat N-raising as such should be abandoned in favor of XP-raising--aconclusion also supported by evidence from other language families.

After developing this framework for analyzing the syntax of adjectives,Cinque applies it to the syntax of English and Italian adjectives. Anappendix offers a brief discussion of other languages that appear todistinguish overtly between the two sources of adjectives.